Books I love

Friday, July 10, 2009

Frida!

Every summer, I run 3 programs in the kiddie's department at Abington Library for 6-10 year old kids called ArtEscape. In an hour-long program, I read the kids a book and using the book (in this case we used Frida Kahlo's artwork) as a springboard, we do a bit of brainstorming and get to the artmaking! Yeah, it's a lot for an hour.

Frida's work is so emotion-based that it was a grand opportunity to discuss how art expresses feelings. The kids were very empathetic toward Frida and her art. Although that empathy didn't get in their way. As you can see here, these kids were feeling pretty joyful.

Simple directions: I cut out a bunch of head shapes and animals, since our time is so limited.We talked about feature placement on the head and the colors that Frida used. We talked about how active Frida's backgrounds were. Then cut loose with markers and glue sticks.

You'll have more time at home so adding collaged hair, tissue paper backgrounds, sequins or other glitz would be fitting here. If I'd had all the time in the world, it would have been great fun to look at Mexico's folk art as well.

I hope you share this with your kids or - what the heck - try it out yourself. Dang good fun.

Thanks to Abington Library for having me and these great free programs for kids. You folks are the best!

ALWAYS looking for good ideas with kids. I do this project but on black paper with cray-pas so that the colors really jump. I like the idea of cutting out animals before hand to collage. I usually have them incorporate drawings of their actual pets or favorite animals.

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